Some of you may have noticed that all our Amazon product links have been hidden since early December, although you could still create or edit them. This is actually directly related to a brief downtime we had on December 1st. What transpired was that Amazon's (presumably automated) systems mistook our affiliate links as "phishing collection points" and basically tried to shut our whole site down.

First, their "brand protection" partner, MarkMonitor, sent an email to our hosting provider ServInt, who then forwarded it to us. We clarified that it was a false positive and got in touch directly with MarkMonitor. Their representative confirmed over the phone that it was indeed a mistake, and that they had rejected the service request from Amazon.

But our site still went down for a few hours (possibly more for some visitors) after our DNS provider (Dyn) suspended our zone -- without prior notice -- after receiving an abuse ticket. In the end we moved our DNS hosting to another provider. A customer service officer from Amazon eventually responded to my queries, apologizing for the frustration and claiming that there was no record of phishing detected on our Amazon Associates account. Dyn took five days to reinstate our account.

The Amazon links will return once I make some technical changes (redirecting back to the album page if the links were accessed directly, for instance). But hopefully my account of this incident will help convince some people about the dangers of SOPA/PIPA legislation -- namely the removal of due process, which was the case when Dyn suspended our service indiscriminately. Imagine what it'll be like if they were legally required to do so, at the mercy of overzealous copyright enforcers with the very real possibility of false positives! At the same time I must commend our provider ServInt, not just for standing by a customer, but also for acting as a major voice in the campaign for a free Internet.

Woah, that's stupidly low by Amazon. I guess I better avoid doing business with them in the future (as well as Dyn but I have never heard of them anyway) until it offers significant compensation for the damage caused. You should document it more extensively and make it more public if possible. Send it to slashdot or some such place.

... But hopefully my account of this incident will help convince some people about the dangers of SOPA/PIPA legislation ...

I think people haven't waited for vgmdb issues to know SOPA/PIPA is a joke ;p
France got a similar problem with the HADOPI law, finally voted, but not (really -afaik) applied/applicable

they will probably vote that shit without being able to apply it for real
when it's possible millions of internet users pirate anything digital, how could they even apply it? (or they could aim at random users)

they will probably vote that shit without being able to apply it for real

You are missing the fact that only thanks to the goodwill on part of the ISP Gigablah even got to know of this whole issue affecting vgmdb. And the proposed law essentially says to the companies "you don't even need to notify your affected customers at all" so more of them will save the money and troubles involved if it passes. Amazon, MarkMonitor and Dyn already did.

HADOPI is comparatively unworkable only because it's not about closing down comparatively few websites, but about essentially randomly locking internet accesses thus affecting 100% of the population as the act of browsing always necessarily makes a local copy of copyrighted stuff being browsed.

ServInt is a great host. They helped me out by contacting me when one of my "customers" was hosting pirated software that got notice. Instead of shutting down my site they simply told me of the problem and I took care of it. I've been hosted with them for several years and currently still am.